Three major periods
If you look at when we are most susceptible in our life, there are three major periods with three P‘s: post-conception, postnatal, and pre-conception (note: in the video).
One is the postnatal period, certainly from the time we are born until about three years old. This is the time when we are at our weakest in terms of the environment, or strongest. That is when abuse, trauma, abandonment really change the genetics. They mark the genetics in such an interesting and, oftentimes, tragic way that we deal with it in terms of psychopathy, personality disorders, terrorism, etc. It is one of those things we know how to absolutely keep from happening. We do not how to cure them, but we know how to stop them, and that is by getting rid of abandonment and abuse early on.
But, beyond that, there is the preconception period. That is a weird time to be susceptible, before you are even conceived. This occurs through these transposons in the female reproductive tract. After sex, in the female reproductive tract, the sperm is there for about a day or so. But a lot of them die. There is only one hero who makes it to the end and all these other soldiers helping along. Those soldiers are breaking down and they are releasing their contents. Well, the major contents they are releasing are the transposons. A lot of the transposons we have, these little pieces of DNA we got from retro viruses like HIV, and all other sorts of viruses, and some bacteria become part of us. We use them because it helps us rearrange our DNA, so, for example, we have very good immune systems. Every time we get sick or we are exposed to a new cold virus, these (note: the transposons) are busy at work recombining our immune system, so that it can recognize that virus. On the other hand, these transposons make us very vulnerable to cancer; a lot of the cancers are because of these.
As everything with the genetics – and this is a fundamental part of my view – this is the story: there are no good or bad genetic effects, it is always about how you look at them. We are happy about the immune system being helped by transposons, but we are not so crazy about the cancer side of it.
But in the case of what happens during conception, you start getting a mix of all the different sperms’ transposable elements. Now, here is the trick. If the woman has had sex with two or three guys in that same 24 hour period, they are all going to be infecting each other’s transposons. When the child is born, even though, through paternity testing of the DNA, regular DNA, you will say: “well, that is the father”, actually the child will have three fathers. It will become a mosaic. What is born would be partially controlled by one father, let’s say the spleen, the liver, part of the brain, and then the rest is a mix. These are not passed on to the next generation, but the child really has three fathers. This is very disturbing stuff, right?
Actually, I wanted to start with this to make sure everybody is awake. It is one of those true stories like watching a film the first time. The film is the thing and you are going to thank God there is nothing like this. This is the thing I am talking about, the thing is the THING. Now, if we look at this, we say: “well, at least we know one thing, at least we know that identical twins are identical”. A lot of psychology is based on this. What percent of a certain behavior is due to heredity (genetics) and how much is due to environment is based on the idea that identical twins are identical. It turns out, of course, that they are not identical at all. You can’ find two identical twins who are identical.
A lot of this is due to the thing called CNV or Copy Number Variants. These are transposons clipping and moving multiple copies of different genes to different places. One identical twin can inherit from the mother 10 copies of one thing having to do with behavior, or hair color, or skin color. You can see here (note: in the video): these are identical twins and some are not the same color at all. We always think of it in terms of the external, but what is internally, all their organs and their mind, can be very different. That has really changed psychology and how we look at nature vs. nurture and their relative contribution because there is no longer something we can count on, because they are all different.